Tessa shrugged. ‘Very well. Get her another mink.’

The little packet arrived at 12 Front Street, Byker, a fortnight later. ‘I am advised,’ said the covering note in Guy’s looped hand, ‘that you would like this, so have endeavoured to overcome my scruples.’

Martha, removing the layers of tissue, found a delicate filigree locket containing what she had begged for vainly every time he came: his photograph.

‘I am advised.’ Only a girl could thus have advised him. He had found her, then: the girl in Vienna who had sent him off to South America looking the way he had looked when she first saw him in the orphanage — closed and defensive and hurt beyond belief. Guy had never spoken of her, but Martha had guessed and been wicked enough to hate her for what she had done to him.

Well, she had been wrong. Guy had gone back and found her and she was the right one; she understood.

With hands that trembled a little, she fastened the locket around her neck. She was to wear it until the day she died.

At Burg Pfaffenstein, David Tremayne was achieving the miracles that Guy expected and for which he paid him. The rooms in the arcaded Fountain Courtyard were refurbished, the stonework cleaned, new lighting and new stoves were installed. Girls with their dirndl aprons hitched over their knees scrubbed and chattered their way through the great rooms. The one hundred and thirty-seven clocks were wound, the three hundred and eighteen mirrors polished. The leaking boats which belonged to the castle were repaired and repainted for the pleasure of the expected guests. Chefs were summoned, horses hired.

The Duchess and the Margravine viewed these preparations with benevolence. Though minutely concerned with the seating precedence of the hundred or so expected visitors, they would appear suddenly on an upturned crate sharing a sandwich with one of the stonemasons or be found bandaging a labourer’s cut hand. As for David, he was soon a favourite with them and bidden to call them Tante Augustine and Tante Tilda.

Since Guy, determined to completely surprise Nerine, still kept his identity a secret, it was inevitable that quite a mythology sprang up round Pfaffenstein’s new owner, glimpsed only as a Mephistophelean figure in a chariot of tulip wood. That he was foreign was regrettable but the villagers, seeing the castle brought back to its former glory, were very willing to don their green and crimson liveries and show him how things should be done.

‘Though they’re all very sad that it will mean saying goodbye to the Princess,’ said David, reporting to his employer as he did once a week at Sachers.

Guy leaned back on the red plush sofa, his fingers laced behind his head.

‘Ah, yes, the ubiquitous Putzerl. Is she to honour us with her presence then?’

The Princess of Pfaffenstein had promptly signed the documents she had been sent but had shown no further sign of life.

‘I don’t know. I imagine so, surely? Her aunts certainly hope that she will come. It’s her birthday on the eighteenth — the day of the ball.’

Guy’s eyebrows rose in faint surprise. Martha celebrated the nineteenth as his birthday, but that was the day he had been found.

David sighed. He was a susceptible and romantic young man who had been much moved by the way the people of Pfaffenstein spoke of the princess. ‘She sounds a most taking little thing. It isn’t just her aunts — everyone seems to tell me of some good thing she has done. Not taking soup to the poor and all that stuff, but real things.’

He broke off, recalling the vignettes that the villagers had conjured up for him in the dialect he was just beginning to understand. The tiny, six-year-old princess, in a white frilled nightdress, eluding her nurse to walk barefoot at night down the crazy, tortuous footpath which wound round the crag on the far side of the drawbridge, in order to bring the innkeeper’s daughter — ill with scarlet fever — one of her own dolls. The suddenly halted carriage, containing a screeching archduchess and a prostrate governess, from which the child had leapt in order to wade into the lake and rescue a kitten some boys were trying to drown. And a later, graver image: the princess at thirteen, walking through the great hall of the castle where the wounded officers lay, cared for by coiffed and nobly born nurses, ceaselessly asking, ‘But where are the men? Who’s nursing the men?

‘She sounds as though there’s not an ounce of snootiness in her. And full of pluck!’

‘Come, David. You’re not trying to cut out the vacuous prince, surely?’

David flushed. ‘No. Though that’s one of the things they most regret, that they won’t see her wedding.’

With five weeks to go, the invitations to the house party began to home like gold-limned doves into the homes of Austria’s high nobility and were everywhere received with pleasure and excitement. If Pfaffenstein could be sold to a millionaire reputed, varyingly, to be an American shipping magnate, an Armenian oil tycoon and a banker from Basle, why not Schloss Landsberg whose marble hall of mirrors was fast sinking on to the terrace below, or Malk, along whose famous topiary allée an ever-diminishing posse of gardeners clipped their way from dawn to dusk. The Countess of Wittenfurt, known as the meanest woman in Europe, bought a new dress; the ninety-two-year-old Prince Monteforelli had himself injected with fresh monkey gland. Even the appalling Archduchess Frederica, tottering through her ruined palace on Spanish heels and demanding that the bailiffs leave her presence backwards, pronounced herself willing to attend — and the Archduke Sava, exiled to Graz, asked if he could bring his bear.

‘Putzerl will be pleased.’ The comment first uttered by her intended husband, Maxi, was repeated continually as octogenarians examined their emblazoned carriages, landgravines looked out their lace and the nobility everywhere prepared to converge on Pfaffenstein for a week of good living at someone else’s expense.

It says much for the esprit de corps which made up the old Empire’s crème de la crème that not one of them grudged the young Princess of Pfaffenstein her good fortune; nor did even one of the mothers of marginally eligible sons so much as consider trying to secure the newly rich princess for their own offspring. For the fact that Putzerl was destined — and soon now — for Maxi and his moated Wasserburg had been known to every one of them since the day she had been carried, screaming and empurpled, to the christening font in Schönbrunn Palace and the Emperor had smiled and said he hoped she would not grow too hot to handle.

‘You must simply assume that Putzerl is going to marry you,’ said the Princess of Spittau, on the day the invitation reached her. ‘It mustn’t be a question of whether but simply of when.’

‘Yes, Mother,’ said Prince Maximilian.

Late spring was always a trying time at the Wasserburg. The ice cracked and more people than usual fell into the water. Frost-damaged tiles slid off the roof. The longer days gave strength to the germs which had been frozen during the winter months: people who had mere colds developed influenza; those who had been suffering from influenza got bronchitis or pneumonia. The Prince’s housemaids became pregnant, also his bitches. Frogspawn covered the moat.

The old princess looked at her son. How to make him take a more manly role, that was the question. Because he had to marry Putzerl. With the money she brought from Pfaffenstein they could keep going for a while. There would be children, too, the line would be preserved, thought the Swan Princess, making a note that something would have to be done about the nursery block, a kind of fortress in an inner courtyard in which the Spittau babies were immured till old enough to swim.

‘Which uniforms are you going to take to Pfaffenstein?’ she asked her son.

Maxi brightened. ‘I thought the Tyrolean Rifles for the banquet and the Hussars for the opera. And for the reception and the opening ball, the Artillery. That’s Putzerl’s favourite.’

‘An infantry regiment for the banquet?’ said his mother, shocked. ‘Still, that’s not until the last day. If you haven’t got hold of Putzerl by then, God help us all. Let’s go and have a look.’

But when the arthritic old princess, leaning heavily on her son, reached the huge, painted cupboard in which Maxi’s uniforms were kept, disaster awaited them. Mildew had mottled the splendid silver green of the Tyrolean Rifles; some biologically interesting but unsavoury fungi had colonized the pink breeches of the Hussars…

Furiously, the princess tugged at the bell-rope and the prince’s valet appeared.

‘The prince’s uniforms must be taken to the drying room at once,’ she ordered. ‘How dare you let them get into such a state!’

The valet pointed to the walls, running with moisture, and shrugged. ‘What can you do, Highness?’ he said, and gathered up the offending garments, forebearing to point out that the drying room was now unheated.

‘The Artillery’s all right,’ said Maxi, relieved, fingering the sumptuous, braided uniform with its beguiling slender lines in the style of the Crown Prince Rudolf, which had won first prize at the Paris World Fair as the most beautiful uniform on earth. Yes, he would propose to Putzerl in that. It was not as though she was the sort of girl who would expect him to go down on his knees, something which the tightness of the trousers rendered quite impossible.

Or would it after all be better done in mufti? In some private spot in the forest? With, of course, the dogs…?

‘As for me,’ declared the princess, ‘it doesn’t matter what I wear, because I still have my pearls.’